I'm the founding partner of Proteus International, and author of Growing Great Employees, Being Strategic, and Leading So People Will Follow. You can follow me on Twitter @erikaandersen. My websites are erikaandersen.com, and www.proteus-international.com. I'm insatiably curious. I love figuring out how people, situations and objects work, and how they could work better: faster, smarter, deeper, with greater satisfaction, more affection, and a higher fun quotient.

A Surpising Antidote To Bad Customer Service

Somebody sent me a post from the HBR blog that I found both inspiring and practical. The author, Jeffrey Rayport, focused on a particular act of everyday yet extreme kindness by an American Airlines employee, someone who went far beyond her duty in order to help make sure a guest got on a flight that was very important to him.

Rayport notes that such individual acts can have enormous positive consequences for the organization involved. I wholeheartedly agree. In a post I wrote a few years ago, I Love Jetblue – Customer Service Done Right, I used Jetblue as an example of great customer service, and another airline as an example (in my experience) of the opposite. In this era when a single person’s customer service experience can immediately be socialized across the web, one instance of pure kindness can resonate around the world.

In the words of my friend and client Danny Meyer, “The Road to Success is Paved with Mistakes Well Handled.” (the title of a chapter in his book, ‘Setting the Table’). Danny believes – and I couldn’t agree more – that mistakes happen in any business – what’s more important than preventing mistakes is managing what happens immediately afterward.

And when ‘what happens immediately afterward’ is imbued with kindness and personal care for the customer, that customer’s affection for and allegiance to the company providing that response is likely to increase dramatically.

If this is true, then why don’t smart leaders make it their business to ‘bake’ kindness into their business plans? As Rayport says in his article, reflecting on the American Airlines example he offers:

Like all case studies, this is but a single data point. But it leaves me wondering what any business might stand to gain if it oriented its associates to look out aggressively for opportunities to perform true acts of kindness for their customers.

And kindness doesn’t have to cost money – or even take more time. In my experience with Jetblue, I’ve been struck by the fact that Jetblue flight attendants don’t spend more time with me, or give me extra ‘things’ – it’s just that their interactions with me seem almost invariably characterized by a real wish to make my experience on their plane as easy and pleasant as possible. In fact, part of Merriam-Webster’s definition of ‘kind’ is: “wanting and liking to do good things and to bring happiness to others.”

If kindness is a competitive advantage, how do you build it into your business? Here are five doable approaches:

Hire for it. People value kindness or they don’t; it’s very difficult to get an employee to be consistently kind if it’s not something he or she personally values. In other words, if you want your people to be consistently kind to customers, you have to hire kind people. You can build this quality into your hiring process,by asking scenario-based interview questions that propose a situation where kindness is a possibility, and see what the person says. For example, if you’re hiring retail clerks for your store, you might ask, “Imagine that you’re waiting on an older customer who is having a hard time finding her credit card, and there are lots of people waiting in line. What would you do?” The candidate’s answer will reveal a good deal about whether kindness is part of his or or her nature (“I’d let the other folks know it will be just a minute more” or “I’d ask her if she’d like to take some time to find her card while I wait on the next person”) or not (“I’d tell her she’s inconveniencing others” or “Just wait till she figures it out, I guess”).

Model it. What you do as the leader is more important than what you say. If you aren’t kind, it’s unlikely your staff will be. Reflect honestly on your interactions with your staff and your customers. Are you consistently kind to them, or are you sometimes impatient, abrupt, condescending, irritable? Whether or not you think it’s fair, your actions become an unconscious template for your employees. If you really want them to display kindness, you’re going to have to learn to eliminate your own not-so-kind behaviors., toward customers, and toward employees.

Bring it inside. Which brings us to the next step. When employees are treated with kindness, they’re much more likely to turn around and treat others kindly – employees, customers, their bosses, and the general public. Danny Meyer’s company, Union Square Hospitality Group, has a core philosophy they call “enlightened hospitality,” which is all about kindness. The first tenet is “take care of each other,” and the second is “take care of the guest.” For them, being kind to fellow employees comes even before kindness to the customer: they see it as foundational to their success.

Reward it. Acknowledge and support people for being kind. Figure out how to build it into your formal reward systems (bonuses, promotions, raises). It can also be very powerful to celebrate it more informally, to ‘catch people being kind.’ For example, another of our client companies is a large financial consultancy. Last year, one of their smaller clients ran into a complex and unexpected tax problem. Rather than simply advising from afar, their key consultant flew to their headquarters and stayed until the problem was resolved. At the next all-hands meeting, the CEO of the consulting firm shared this story and praised the consultant as an example of how they want to support their clients.

Talk About It. Make kindness, and its importance in your business, part of the ongoing dialogue. When you’re thinking about how to market your services, for example, brainstorm ways of getting your focus on kindness into the message. When the sales people are meeting to talk about building new business, ask, “How could being kind help gain new customers?” If you’re discussing a customer service policy that does’t work as well as you’d like, think about whether an increased focus on kindness could improve it.

There’s more good news: unlike many policies that leaders try to enact, establishing a ‘kindness policy” will – for the most part – create a positive response. Most people like being kind: it feels good. Most people also like to feel proud of the company they work for – and if you build your company to have kindness as a competitive advantage, that’s real cause for pride.

And this all leaves me with the question I asked earlier – Why don’t more companies don’t focus on kindness as a competitive advantage? What do you think?

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Great points, Erica. Kindness is indeed very powerful and a single act of kindness can make a lasting impression, in addition to making someone’s day. The good news is that when given the opportunity, most people truly want to make customers happy. In fact, in research done with our Career Motivation test, customer orientation (true desire to make customers happy) was one of the most powerful motivators, as was altruism. See http://www.queendom.com/about/media/pr_psychtests_career_motivators_test.html

I think it comes down to company culture, and I believe it greatly depends on the managers who drive that culture. If the length of time you spend with each customer is monitored and you get reprimanded for lack of efficiency or for fighting on behalf of the customer, you will become impatient and sour. If it becomes a pattern, you will become indifferent. If you are treated by your boss as if you don’t matter, as if you were just a machine with brain, or even worse, as if you were a pimple on the face of humanity, you will only try to get through the day so you can get out of the toxic environment, and everyone who crosses your path will get a share of that negativity. That’s what kills kindness.

To answer your question why don’t more companies focus on kindness as a competitive advantage, I think it’s because 1) they are focusing on the bottom line and don’t realize that the way people are treated (both employees and customers) has a major impact on the bottom line 2) kindness is not a skill and has to come from the heart 3) you need to bring in managers who are kind and altruistic, and quite frankly, those are not the types of people who tend to get promoted to the top level 4) touting kindness as a competitive advantage may sound a bit tacky.

Nice job, Erika. The simplest of human virtues often get lost in the corporate shuffle. The airlines are certainly a great example. Retailers are right up there as well.

The reasons those virtues are lost are complicated. On a basic level, their stock price doesn’t reflect an appreciation of kindness or customer service. And that short-sightedness will cost them in the end.

I completely agree – until organizations figure out clearer, better ways to quantify the impact of kindness, customer service and great management on the bottom line, those things won’t get the attention they deserve.